1st flatiron

I grew up in the Northeast; in my first 18 years I didn’t really stand out from my peers in terms of good or bad judgment—we were teenagers—all we had was bad judgment. Probably my first opportunity to make a serious decision was when I chose where to go to college.

Here’s how I made it: I pushed a pin into a map where my parents lived and drew a circle with a radius of 2000 miles around it, with the intent to go to school anywhere on or outside that circle. This gave me options in southern Greenland, the Northwest Territories, the Yucatan Peninsula, the Sierra Madres del Sur of Mexico, and of course the Rocky Mountain West. I went to college at the University of Denver and then the University of Colorado in Boulder.

(I should mention I wasn’t trying to get away from parents or family—I just wanted to re-invent my life from scratch.)

Once in Colorado I fell in love with the mountains, but discovered I had a tremendous fear of heights. This was an opportunity for me (finally) to start using good judgment.

I took several rock-climbing courses—this definitely seemed like good judgment. I also bought a 150-foot kernmantle climbing rope and the usual array of hexcentrics, slings, carabiners, climbing shoes, etc, and hooked up with some like-minded and similarly skilled beginning climbers, and began climbing above Boulder.

Green Mountain, just southwest of Boulder, has three huge rock formations on it called the Flatirons, surrounded by dozens of other interesting options suitable for bouldering or longer technical routes. Both during my climbing courses and on personal climbs I’d spent time on the Flatirons and other Green Mountain routes, as well as routes in Boulder Canyon and Eldorado Springs Canyon. One day my two climbing companions and I decided to basically wander up the east face of the 1st Flatiron, starting at its lowest point, eschewing—and leaving home—our route guides. This may not have been our best moment of judgement.

No pictures were taken during the climb described, but I took this photo on another climb on the same face of the 1st Flatiron; view is to the south, away from the city of Boulder.

The East face of the 1st Flatiron, angled at about 50º, is a bit over 1000 feet high. Fifty degrees isn’t a very high angle, and isn’t even necessarily technical, it can be ‘4th class.’ (First class is walking on a trail; 2nd class is bushwhacking, 3rd class is steep hiking, sometimes on rock with moderate exposure, may use hands to climb; fourth class is on steep-to-vertical rock with enough exposure that a fall would cause injury or death, but having adequate hand- and footholds so that no technical expertise is required. Fifth class is ‘technical climbing,’ currently divided into 15 additional sub-grades ranging loosely, from a hiker’s perspective, from “Um, I’ll pass, thanks” to “Are you f-ing insane?”

If you’ve ever climbed you know the leader starts up the face, putting in protection along the way, while another climber belays him or her from below. The leader puts in protection by inserting small oddly-shaped metal ‘nuts’ such as hexcentrics (back in the time I was climbing) into cracks in the face. These nuts usually included a short loop of cable passing through them, or if larger, had holes through which cord could be threaded and tied off to make a loop. The leader then clips the climbing rope to the cable (more often to a sling through the nut’s cable loop) using a carabiner, and continues up while being belayed from below.

So up our leader went. He was unable to find anywhere to place protection, but the rock was only 4th class so he continued about 100 feet up the face; he found a small ledge to brace his feet on and called up the next climber. She climbed up, but as the leader’s ledge was too small, she continued up the face another 30 feet above him, still without finding a place to put in protection, but found another so-called ledge. They called me up; typically, the last climber removes all the protection that’s been placed but of course in this case it wasn’t necessary. Soon I was thirty feet above the second climber, on a third thin ledge. Then we continued up the rock, which had gradually gotten ‘thinner,’ that is, gradually passed from 4th class to technical—still not that demanding, but we were now a couple hundred feet or so up the face and still not connected to it in any meaningful way. And now our two climbing ropes were hopelessly tangled up; it was at this point we engaged in a somewhat intense debate about good and bad judgment.

On the other hand, the view was spectacular! We could see tens of miles out onto the plains; below us to the left, we could see the city of Boulder, which looked like a toy village nestled up against the Front Range of the Rockies. And of course, directly below us we could see the lovely spot where we were possibly going to tumble to our deaths, and where our bodies would be recovered later that day.

Or not. Instead of continuing up, we traversed across the face and soon we were protected, untangled, and in firm possession of better judgement concerning route-planning.

Unfortunately for me, it turned out that improved judgement in one specific situation did not automatically translate well to other situations, even within technical climbing, and so my life continued to become interesting with a bit too much regularity. To be continued.

South face of the 1st Flatiron; photo shows an example of a 4th class climb: not technically difficult, but significant exposure.